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A marriage of living Biblical faith with
scientific process and knowledge.
NOTE: The Table of Contents below contains only the first level
divisions under each chapter.
There may be two or three lower levels below these first in the book.
Ignore the page numbers.
1-A. The Biblical Worldview 18
1-B. Two Circuits - Illustrated by Transformer 19
1-C. The Secular/Pagan Worldview 23
2-A. The Power of Being - Our Basic Faith-Dependency Relation 56
2-B. The Spiritual Center - Our Place of Dependency 57
2-C. My Doing - My Responsibility 67
2-D. Authority for Doing - Moral Responsibility 73
2-E. Mounting up the Five Decisions 76
3-A. The Healthy Soul 106
3-B. The Damaged Soul 110
4-A. Layers of the Unconscious 146
4-B. Spiritual Transformers - the Primary & Secondary Circuits 155
4-C. The Soul's Defenses 163
4-D. More Internal Defenses 165
6-A. Closed-Circle Faith-Dependency Relation 240
7-A. Being vs. Doing 271
7-B. The Three "I's" 313
8-A. Life in the Faith-Dependency Relation 346
8-B. Life in the Closed-Circle of the Forbidden Tree 347
8-C. Ultimate & Particular Purposes 350
9-A. The Sacrament of the "Other" 409
Complete Preface shown.
As with most things that deeply concern one, I have come to my involvement with inner healing and psychology partly through my quest to find out how I tick, and why ticks are so often out of sync with tocks.
My upbringing had prepared me in good fashion for an intellectual life, but very poorly for an emotional life. That led to a haunting feeling through most of my now seven decades that there were two of me, that on one hand I was moving along and progressing and growing extremely well, but also that there was another me that was not doing well at all. Trying to come to a sense of unity within myself in the midst of growing up, and then myself raising a family, being a teacher, an Episcopal priest, therapist, director of an "ex-gay" ministry, and writer has led through many paths, painful and pleasant, out of which has come much of this book. Naturally, I tried my best to spend time where I excelled, not where I lacked, which meant in the intellectual realm.
My interest in psychology began at the early age of about ten, if I recall correctly. My year-older brother had come home from school with stories about "psychology", which he reported as a rather scary method by which someone could look inside of you to know all of the bad things down in there. I resolved that night in bed, with all the determination that a ten year old can muster, that I would not allow any psychologist to scare me, and that I would not be afraid of what I found inside of myself -- little knowing what was to come. But it was a new step on a venture of self-discovery which continues unabated into my seventieth year.
Many years later I was pastoring a parish. I had been trained as a pastoral counselor and had taught college level courses in psychology and religion. In 1971, I found myself sharing life with a small community of persons in my parish who declared themselves willing to do whatever God might require in order to make our strife-ridden parish come spiritually alive. It did not take long to discover that the stresses of being a pastor were beyond the emotional resources that I had readily available within me. So I was looking for help.
Much of my ten year ministry there was spent exploring ways of making our Christian spiritual life more available to persons who, despite the sacraments and all the traditional teaching and growth programs, still felt themselves lacking in their sense of joy and peace as children of God. It became clear that many were not experiencing themselves as children of God at all, or at least only when surrounded by the affirming Christian fellowship. Out in "the world", facing the stresses of family and job, the presence of God often "evaporated".
There were many times when I felt exactly that way. The emotional part of my inner being was limping lamely along, miles behind my intellectual understanding of the spiritual life. So I had great personal motivation to seek for ways of removing some of those inner blocks to an open and clear relation with God and with my fellow human beings. A great deal of this present book was being formulated during those parish years from l971 to l981.
It has been, and still is, a puzzle and great disappointment to me that the healing ministry is such a small part of Christian teaching and preaching. Even Christian counseling does little to relate the healing process to one's relation to Jesus Christ. Christians have all but handed over healing to secular physicians, psychiatrists, and psychologists. Psychology has become a substitute religion in America. We are thought to be able to heal (or stuck with healing) ourselves. And the typical pastor is ill-schooled in understanding how contemporary Christianity can stand toe-to-toe with secular modes of healing. Nevermind that secular emotional healing has never produced what it promised for the society.
A large part of the reason for the Church's ignoring of the healing ministry is lack of belief that anything would happen, a long phase of which I went through myself. But there also a is dearth of materials integrating honest Biblical faith with honest psychological studies. And behind that is the very destructive suspicion that reason is of the devil, as opposed to faith which is of God.
That opposition is untrue to the Bible, as I hope to show. Faith and reason are part and parcel of each other. Neither will survive without the other. More will be said on that in Chapter X on The Role of the Bible in a Healing Community.
The only substantially viable psychology is, I believe, that emerging out of the Bible. The deepest problems which face us all, including secular psychology, are ultimately unresolvable in any other framework. The study of the psyche from a secular point of view has yielded many good results wherever people with an honest desire for truth were conducting the study. But the study of the soul (psyche) is inherently a religious (metaphysical) enterprise, so that the secular attempt, despite the (more or less) good press it gets today, always runs aground on the most interesting and vital issues that we all face -- the stability and the meaning of life. The stability and meaning of my life. Can I be loved for who I am rather than for what I do? What is love? Can we be fully human without being sexually active? And on it goes.
That such questions have more human-friendly answers in the Biblical, Judeo-Christian, worldview than in secular views does not by itself make the Biblical worldview true. We might just be out of luck. But it does create a powerful and justifiable incentive to investigate as to whether it is true -- and, other things being equal, creates a very rightful predisposition toward the Biblical view. The truth is that, not only does psychology necessarily have to do with God, psychology is essentially and inevitably about our relation, or the lack of it, with God. If therapists understood that, their efforts would bear far more fruit. Unless it can be shown that we humans are, or can become, independent autonomous decision-makers, secular psychology will be always incomplete and incapacitated.
It is worth noting that the Biblical view can incorporate any truth found by secular research. There have been no facts discovered by secular researchers about the psyche that the Biblical view cannot incorporate -- and indeed make better sense of. But the reverse is not true. Many things religious people find common place are foreign ground for secular folks, and unassimilable by them. Difficult, if not impossible, for example, for secular psychology to deal with is our inherently dependent nature, objective meaning in life, guilt, and moral standards. All of these are very important to our psychology.
But all this requires a major overhaul of Biblical theology -- which has, in its presently understood form, proven itself incapable of meeting the challenges of modernity and post-modernity. Biblical Inner Healing is itself a part of this much wider effort by Emmaus Ministries to show that the epistemology, the worldview, and Gospel of the Bible offer the only substantial and enduring resolutions to the great raft of problems with which the human race fitfully grapples. This book is part of, and nestled in, a much larger apologetics project, which can be accessed on the http://theRoadtoEmmaus.org website.
The Road to Emmaus is a "school of Judeo-Christian apologetics" covering the wider issues of Biblical worldview and the Christian relationship to the natural sciences, epistemology, psychology, politics, economics, and education. Many of the footnote references will help link the reader to this wider context. Several major written works are planned in the above areas.
Three notions have guided my thinking and commitment to emotional healing.
First, I was determined that faith must make sense. It must be related to everyday life in a manner that does not fly in the face of logical common sense. The Gospel of Jesus Christ, once you see it, seems mind-bogglingly common-sense. That does not rule out mysteries or the unexpected. But it does rule out flat contradictions. God is a God of reason and order, not chaos, not intellectual chaos any more than emotional or spiritual chaos. God, not secular philosophers or secular scientists, holds the intellectual high ground.
Secondly, something in me rebelled against the idea that the truth was the domain of the "experts". The Bible never gives any hints that it is the experts in anything that get into heaven, not, at least, by reason of their expertise. They get in by being in touch with basic reality of the sort with which any one of us can be in touch. That meant that basic Biblical theology must be within the grasp of a fairly ordinary sort of mind. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is common sense -- of a sensibleness common to the human race (that to which Paul appeals in 2 Corinthians 4:1-2). I am hoping that the following will recommend itself in that way to the reader. Again, that is not to rule out grappling with difficult and abstruse problems by the experts. But the basic understanding of the revelation of a personal God is not something one needs a college degree to grasp. One needs only to be a reasonably healthy person.
Thirdly, and related to the above, something kept telling me, in often strange ways, that truth is inherently sacramental, that is, that spiritual truth is fundamentally related to this world of space and time, that the invisible and spiritual is quite at home in and manifested through the physical and material. The whole Judeo-Christian worldview, including the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is common sense intellectually, and also sensorily. We are made in the Image of God -- in (of all things) our sexual nature.1 The physical manifests the spiritual.
These three notions seemed to me fundamentally related to the Biblical doctrine of creation, that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and ourselves in His image. A theology of the Imago Dei is absolutely fundamental to our conveying the Gospel to a modern world. That means that no theology can be Christian without first being Judeo. The Hebrew doctrine of creation, which is the foundation of all true monotheism, separates the Biblical worldview from all other philosophies, religions, psychologies, and anthropologies. (The single except to that is Islam, which is, in a sense "Biblical", but being its own special case -- is incapable, I believe, of the kind of theology or psychology to which this book points. But that is an issue for another book.)
Today I am absolutely sure that these things are true. All of this was poured into the crucible of my life, along with the content of an extraordinary education at a (more or less) Episcopal college where I received a BA in philosophy, a beginning-to-deteriorate Episcopal seminary, and a (more or less) Anglican university where I did my doctorate on the relation between science and theology.2
A large percentage of what is said in this book is "Biblical" or "Judeo-Christian", because it is built on the Genesis account of creation, on the principle that the basic entities in the cosmos are persons, not things (atoms, molecules, etc.) or essences or abstractions, and that the primary value in life is personal relationship. Our primary relationship is with God (first Great Commandment) and our secondary relationships are with each other (second Great Commandment). Our brokenness and wholeness all has to do with holiness, our being made in the Image of God.
The specifically Christian part of this book has to do with salvation and the healing of the brokenness, how, through Christ, God makes Himself present to us.
Western Civilization is properly identified by its two crown jewels: science and due process in civil law (as in a democratic republic under God). Both of these (contrary to received opinion) are rooted in the Biblical worldview, not in secularism -- which means that Western Civ. is Judeo-Christian Civ. But the Christian community has managed to reject both jewels, which have been thus coopted by the secular community, to the dismay and ruin of Western Christendom. Even since the first writing of this book in the late 1980's, Western Civilization has continued to erode ever more rapidly, now to the point of collapse.
Europe is on a course to demographic self-destruction, hostile Muslims are filling the void, and the intense rejection of Judeo-Christian religion deepens. Europe is no longer even reproducing itself, and America is just barely doing so. We kill one fourth of our children, and replace our shrinking population only by immigration -- much of it illegal.
We are being eroded from within by so-called liberal democracy (which is neither liberal nor democratic) and by pagan sexuality, and attacked from without by a militant Islam, with little effective response to any of these from the divided Christian community.3
Annie Dillard tells of watching frogs jumping away from her path as she walked along the edge of an island. One did not jump:
He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my very eyes like a deflated football. I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained form; then the shadow glided away.4
The shadow was a giant water bug, which inserts an enzyme into its victim, dissolving the body contents but not the skin, which are then sucked out by the bug.
Western Civilization has had an acid enzyme inserted into its system which has all but dissolved its immune system, its truth- and righteousness-discerning systems, and the Dark Shadow bids fair to suck the contents from the collapsing remains.
Historian and social critic, Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism and of The Minimal Self, wrote in the latter book:
With the help of an elaborate network of therapeutic professions, which themselves have largely abandoned approaches stressing introspective insight in favor of "coping" and behavior modification, men and women today are trying to piece together a technology of the self, the only apparent alternative to personal collapse.5
Christine Rosen, another commentator, notes:
In a much-discussed 2004 article in Psychology Today, Hara Estroff Marano bluntly argued that the "hothouse parenting" techniques of today's mothers and fathers are creating a "nation of wimps". "With few challenges all their own, kids are unable to forge their creative adaptations to the normal vicissitudes of life," Marano wrote. "That not only makes them risk-adverse, it makes them psychologically fragile, riddled with anxiety. In the process they're robbed of identity, meaning, and a sense of accomplishment, to say nothing at a shot at real happiness." The result, Marano said, is "new levels of psychological distress among the young," including rising rates of depression, whose occurrence among children in the 1990's surpassed that of people over the age of 40.6
Western Civilization is experiencing a failure of nerve such as experienced by the High Hellenic period of ancient Greece, which flourished for a very short time, and then, unable to sustain that marvelous vision of beauty and balance, fell headlong into the Hellenistic lowlands.7 And, apart from the magnificent balance manifested in art form, Greek culture was in many areas very unbalanced -- half of the population being slave to the other, and women treated like chattel.
The driving force in secular or pagan societies will always drift toward pleasure, power, and pride. Or, good feelings, coercion, and self. Or, libido, aggression, and survival. Ancient Greece was no exception. Gender roles were unbalanced by a fierce masculinism. And the rule of the strong, despite extraordinary philosophical efforts to find the meaning of justice, prevailed both philosophically and in practice over the weak. Might made right. Greece was continually wracked by inter-polis warfare. Greek culture did not have the Biblical worldview, in which alone such poise and balance as it attained in the arts could be sustained. It remained a vision, a hope -- and then, as a political force, disappeared in the eternal power struggle under the heel of Phillip and Alexander's rising (but ephemeral) Macedonian empire.
Western Civ. is steadfastly demolishing its own Biblical roots, and so experiencing the same inner erosion of spirit and personhood. As St. Augustine, in The City of God, warned Rome, any culture which does not submit itself to the purposes of God will eventually disappear. The West, signaled by the French Revolution (with America about 75 years behind the European Continent), launched into a rebellious and fatal attempt at independence, not from Louis XIV or George III, but from God. In the name of secularized (not real) science, the West has systematically depersonalized its worldview -- all the while promoting the illusion that we ourselves could continue on as personal beings. Following Ivan Pavlov, B. F. Skinner wrote his behaviorist psychology and philosophy as the summit of rationality, not realizing, apparently, that in doing so, he had eradicated himself as a rational human being, now only an accidental consequence of the accidental of forces impinging upon him. Why would any rational human being (should any be found) choose to listen to one whose own psychology destroys himself as a psychologist?
But, following these pied-pipers of behaviorism, Westerners have depersonalized their world, and therefore themselves, probably at a deeper level than any other culture in history, and so have become numbed and calloused to the spiritual world -- not because that world does not exist as our fundamental basis, but because we have blinded ourselves. We are living in denial, so neither dependency nor obedience makes sense.
Other less technically advanced cultures are more open to the spiritual life and thus to the Gospel. They, too, will fall victim to the massive depersonalization as technology spreads -- if we do not rediscover God as the Creator of heaven and earth, including technology.
We have taken at face value the words of Satan to Eve, "You will be like God, knowing good and evil", discounting the words of God, "for on the day you eat of it, you shall die..." We try to experience ourselves as the impossible -- as independent, autonomous decision-makers, as ontologically and morally self-sufficient. We defeated darkness and distance, and then brought communication and information to heel, and thought our technology had won the day for us.
We no longer experience ourselves as creatures, creation being a notion which we have rejected for impersonal evolution. No longer creatures, we want to be the Creator, some believing that we can control the levers of evolution.
And so we have become like what we worship -- increasingly depersonalized, numbed, and insensitive to personhood itself, and to the mothering and fathering by which alone persons can be raised up. And thus we become numbed to the nature of community life, sharing, and healthy mutual interdependence. We hardly know how to love (make our lives available to, lay down our lives for) our neighbor as ourselves, or even want to. It just does not fit any more. Neighborhoods, except in the least meaningful "geographic" sense, hardly exist in America.
Nineteenth century secularism launched a full-scale attack on the Biblical foundations of Western Civilization, much of it dishonestly and subversively, aided and abetted by a newly discovered psychological tool, mind-control, transmogrified into progressive education and a mandatory public school system.8 Christendom had no credible resources of defense, let alone offense. Christians lost the battle for the 19th century, and whimpered their way through the 20th with tails between their legs, pleading for a place at the table. With just a few exceptions, we have been driven from the public arena.
If you put a weapon in the hands of American manhood and point him at a real enemy, he still does a credible job, almost as though he has again found himself. But American manhood has no intellect, stomach, or backbone for the spiritual war which rages. We have become a nation, as Robert Bly has said, of soft males.9 Apart from sex and violence, manhood and womanhood are almost total mysteries to most Westerners -- including Christians, and the Biblical version is anathema (where it is even anymore understood).
But secularists, who thought they had won the war, did not reckon with our dependent human nature -- which mandates that we will be formed and shaped by the very impersonalism of the world in which we have come to believe. We are being depersonalized, our personhood is being eroded -- a fact to which Westerners have yet to catch on. We are becoming more and more like that which we worship.
In the name of secularized science, we are systematically de-ontologizing, de-moral-izing, dis-integrating, dis-easing our own nature as persons. But our personhood cannot withstand the "dissing". We are, at the start of the 21st century AD, well down that path. There is hardly a spiritual leader, a clergyman, anywhere to be found, a politician, an educator, a public leader of any sort -- who has the intellectual, moral, or spiritual capacity to call (for example) the homosexual agenda publicly -- with truth and grace -- to account.10
Western Christians are largely oblivious -- unaware and unarmed in the spiritual battle raging for Western Civ. We are waving a rubber sword with our britches falling down around our knees. Robert Bly describes the "soft male", which he finds epidemic in the West -- the failure of the warrior, the father who will stand and protect his family, not only militarily, but more importantly, spiritually.11 Western Civ. -- which has had its great and noble moments -- is today a pathological and sinful culture inhabited by pathological, sinful, and oblivious citizens. As one writer put it, "Fifty years ago, no one would have thought that real men, who instinctively protected women and children, would transmogrify into eunuchs who send women into combat and murder the unborn."12 The critique of the West from the Muslim world is much too accurate for comfort. But the independent, autonomous decision-makers of our brave new world have lost their way, and do not know how to repent.
We, at one point, were killing one third of our babies in the womb. Mercifully, that dropped in the 1990's to "only" one fourth. But the emotional and spiritual spin-off from that silent holocaust is devastating to the perpetrators and to the apathetic, as well as to the babies.
The pathology is apparent, especially and increasingly among our youth. The Independent (London, July 27, 2004) wrote of an epidemic of "self-harm", 170,000 a year in England, most of them teens and young adults. In America we have, probably for the first time in human history, children in school taking up deadly weapons against their mates -- for fun. We are increasingly treating ourselves like machines -- trying to fix this and that with chemical cocktails. We are becoming more and more like the world in which we think we live. And it is not working.
Not working... For most people, I suppose, that would mean something like setting us free within and among ourselves to pursue truth and righteousness with a loving spirit. If that is the definition of "working", it is not working.
And worse, many people appear not to even be asking the question as to whether their life is working. We are seduced and satiated by a welfare, no-fault, entitlement mentality so that we hardly think we ought to take care of ourselves. Someone who owes it to us will see to it. That is a pathological and a sinful society.
We have not, as Freud thought, scienced ourselves into a new "reality-based" culture. We have imagined ourselves into our own cosmic tomb, a depersonalized world which eats up persons -- like Annie Dillard's giant water bug.13
But some are catching on. By the grace of God, the waters of life continue to well up in the middle of the desert.
A reality-based (what other kind could there be) Christianity alone can save Western (Judeo-Christian) Civ. from continuing and total self-dissolution back into a despairing paganism. Spiritual renewal requires a renewed understanding of our own human nature. And that can be found only in a renewed understanding of the Living God -- in whose Image we are made.
In the latter 20th century, sprouts of serious Christian intellectual and artistic renewal began, in small pockets, to resurface. The 21st century promises to be quite another story as, around the globe, Christianity is steadily converting the world.
But not yet in the West. The almost total collapse of Christian intellectual credibility in the West brought with it the collapse of moral and spiritual credibility as well. Christians have yet a long way to go before recapturing either the intellect, imagination, or spirit of Westerners.
Why this focus on cultural decay in a book on personal inner healing? Because one cannot separate personal from cultural wholeness. A pathological culture breeds pathological citizens. And because citizens who are spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally healthy (rooted in and obedient to God) can transform a sinful and pathological culture. The collapse of Judeo-Christian culture led directly to the horrendous carnage of the 20th century, and to a culture which does not know how to raise up sturdy, capable, and free persons. Only God does, and we have abandoned Him in the public arena, paying attention (more or less) to Him only in our truncated private lives.
Two issues dominate the problem, but most Christians, including pastors, today are unaware of either problem, let alone the solutions. The two problems are epistemology (how we know what we know) and worldview (in what kind of cosmos do we live?).
For at least two centuries, Christians have not been able to explain how we know the truth of the Christian faith and Gospel, so we are not thought to have intellectual credibility. And we have almost completely lost track of the Biblical worldview and its astonishingly unique character, so we have not been able to respond convincingly to secular materialism.
The recovery of our faith credibility, our Biblical worldview and a Biblical understanding of human nature will go a long way towards raising up those persons who will one day reclaim the West for God. That project is already underway around the world.
It has been said that God wrote two books, not just one. God wrote the Book of Creation first, and then He wrote the Book of Scripture because we messed up the first book. We decided that we did not want to be creatures, we wanted to be independent, autonomous decision-makers. The Book of Scripture was written to bring us back to the first Book, to lead us back again into creation, back to our own creaturehood. If the most stable and unchangeable thing in existence is the Image of God, then persons fully made in that Image will be the second most durable and stable beings.
How would one read the Book of Creation? By accurate observation and by careful reasoning from those observations to conclusions -- by the methods of science. Christians ought to be the best scientists available.
But because we violated the principles of reality contact upon which the whole of Biblical religion is built, because we managed to make an enemy of science and gave it into the hands of secularists and narcissists, we therefore lost the battle for modernity. We became more interested in being "Christian" than in pursuing the truth. Nevermind that Jesus advised us that truth would set us free. Any Christianity arrived at in contradiction to truth-seeking will not pass muster with Jesus.
The result for the last several centuries was a steady erosion of the Biblical worldview, a steady erosion of Judeo-Christian credibility in the mind of the public. And a steady drift back into legalism because we had lost contact with our own Biblical roots -- which tell us of a world which is fundamentally and irreducibly personal -- the creation of a personal God. Most Christians today, if what one hears bandied about is any indication, do not understand the connection between basic Christian doctrine and personal relationship.
The problem goes back to the earliest days when Christians were first advancing into the pagan world of Greek philosophy and Roman government, which were based on a worldview and a philosophical structure which were inherently and irredeemably impersonal.
What, then, would it look like if we lived in a cosmos which is essentially personal? A cosmos created by Someone whose very Image was the definition of personhood? And what difference would it make to be created (or redeemed and recreated) in His image? What difference would that make to our understanding of our own human nature? And how would that help us to become healed, strong, vibrant, joyfilled witnesses for God in Christ?
Those are the questions we will be exploring. We will be "forcing the antithesis" rather than clouding the issues to be "nice" (dialogue to consensus rather than dialogue to truth). Clarity always favors truth and unclarity always favors falsehood. Clarity also creates conflict, an antithesis, (as per John 3:19), but that is the price for truth to prevail. And when truth wins, everybody wins.
We will be learning, among other things, how to read the Book of Creation, how to frame issues in terms that are generic, terms which any person would understand. We will learn how to ask questions which everyone is asking just because they are alive, not merely questions which Christians are asking.
We will, in that manner, be able to show that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is of (at least potential) interest to every human being, not merely to Christians, and that the answers which comprise that Gospel are the best (indeed, the only) viable, answers to those universal questions. We will be able to show compelling reason why any person might want to investigate this person Jesus, to see whether He can come through with His promise to lead to the Father.
The material in this book will make major paradigm shifts away from commonly accepted notions, for both secular and Christian people. I do not believe that there are any infallible things within the created order, certainly not myself. So these thoughts are offered as fodder for continuing discussion and testing. Many of the ideas herein are just germinating, some perhaps misstated. Hopefully they will be filled out and corrected in the public debate. I am conservative in most of my conclusions about life, but I am a classic, Jeffersonian liberal in process, in how we get to those conclusions -- truth will emerge as we keep honest, candid, and mutually respectful discussion alive -- as in, "Come, let us reason together..." (Isaiah 1:18.) God, it seems, is also a classic, Jeffersonian liberal.
Chapter One provides a brief introduction to some of the basic worldview and gender issues of emotional healing. But the reader is encouraged, if he wishes to delve deeply into these issues, to undergird this present reading with a set of video (or audio) tapes, Yahweh or the Great Mother?, which describes the radical differences between the Biblical worldview and its opposition, the secular/pagan worldview. Also very helpful will be a dual set on sexuality and gender, Man & Woman in the Image of God describing the Biblical gender order, and its opposite, Human Sexuality: the Secular Debacle, describing the massive and tragic failure of the secular/pagan attempt at "being sexual".
This present book will stand on its own feet, but a knowledge of the worldview and gender issues will help make some of this book leap off the page more readily.14 I hope it will help open Heaven's doors for you, dear reader.
The Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church has been a branch, is a long, long way from being the Kingdom of God on earth. I have wondered at times why God had me in this branch of His Church. But I have never failed to appreciate a particular gift of the Anglican Communion -- to resist letting go of the various elements of the truth, even when we were not quite sure what to do with some of them or how they fit together into the big picture. Anglicans have a way of putting things on a back shelf which they do not understand rather than throwing them out, trusting that, in due time, God will show us where they fit.
Christian denominations have tended to splinter along the lines of some particular doctrine or pet practice, often hurling anathemas, and sometimes rocks, arrows, or bullets, at folks who do not share their beliefs. The Anglican approach (at least after the Glorious Revolution of the 1660's), for better or for worse, has been to be very cautious about tightly defining doctrinal standards. We have no doctrine of infallibility or inerrancy, much to the chagrin of both the Roman Catholic and the fundamentalist-evangelical wings of Christendom.15 Anglicans have felt it is better to err on the side of looseness to prevent reading someone out of the Kingdom whom God has allowed in, rather than the other way around. Such a strategy works only if accompanied by a serious and sturdy intellectual credibility, a passion for truth.
Failure in these intellectual and theological realms, due as much to lack of moral courage as to lack of intellect, has led to a great deal of ambiguity and mushy thinking, for which the whole of the Anglican Communion, and especially the Episcopal Church, are today paying a very dear price.16 But it has also allowed unrecognized truth to survive in an otherwise hostile environment.
One might not guess it from the standard of education and spiritual awareness typical of an Episcopal congregation in America, but the Anglican Communion stands four square on the Bible as the standard of teaching. Nothing may be taught as necessary for salvation which is not reasonably provable from Scripture. And the Book of Common Prayer, until the backsliding of the 1960's and `70's, gave to serious worshippers a diet of Scripture second to none in Christendom. The Anglican Communion also is very much aware of the value of tradition as the gift of God through our forefathers. And, as a part of our sacramental ethos, we are committed to the full use of our experiencing and reasoning powers in our search for truth and understanding of who God is.
On the other hand, although I started off a rather staid Episcopal priest, I have found it wise to ignore denominational boundaries. The staidness was killing me. Most of my prayer partners over the last twenty years have been Baptist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, and Catholic of one brand or another. Yes, there are legitimate theological issues between us, but the Spirit of God, for the most part, ignores our denominational nonsense. It is my belief that the "true" Church will combine, in Godly order, the evangelical, catholic, and charismatic traditions. As we are told (Ecclesiastes 4:12), a three-fold cord is not easily broken.
All of these elements have been part of the mix which has produced myself and this book. So Biblical Inner Healing is, in a sense, my own story. There is little in the book which has not been tested, and indeed discovered, in the trenches of my own life, which means that I owe much of this to countless persons who have in various ways discipled me, sometimes without either of us knowing it. My hope is that in some significant way God will speak His truth and that the healing ministry of the Church will be furthered and strengthened through these pages.
This book aims at those who want to dig into the intellectual issues, to have minds transformed by truth, as Paul urges in Romans 12:1-2. The transformation of the mind is not merely intellectual, but it is at least that. We must learn how to explain why we believe what we believe. Christians have lost their intellectual credibility, and terribly dishonored God by passing that reputation on to Him. We will be talking much about the transformation of mind, will, and imagination because our wholeness depends heavily on our reality contact. God has only reality to offer, so we had better learn how to identify it.
My testimony is written out, for those interested, in the preface to Homosexuality: Good & Right in the Eyes of God? the Wedding of Truth to Compassion and Reason to Revelation. It is also available at http://theRoadtoEmmaus.org.
La Habra, California, Summer, 2006
The world of mythology, older sister to psychology, is full of symbols and images representing our own inner drives, desires, and goals, both positive and negative. Most of us are familiar with the magic genie in the bottle from Tales of the Arabian Nights, who, when uncorked, will do the bidding of the possessor of the bottle.
This genie can symbolize our yearnings for that free sense of selfhood, bottled and corked up within us. But the Jeannie or the Gene within was not corked up by a sorcerer's magic. Rather, Gene or Jeannie was a part of myself, as we shall see, which I shoved down into the bottle -- because I felt compelled to protect, or I could not tolerate the presence of, that part of myself. Or both.
Imagine yourself reliving a past memory. Think of the place -- who was there -- the emotional atmosphere -- the colors and sounds. Perhaps one of those hard times of your life when part of you got shoved into your bottle. Recall the details. Remember how you yourself felt being there.
Then suppose something new to happen. Suppose, in addition to all of those circumstances you can recall, that one thing was different, namely that Jesus walked physically present into that situation just as you might have met Him on the streets of Jerusalem, A. D. 30, the King of kings, and Lord of lords. Suppose Jesus showed up. It may seem an absurdly unimaginable supposition, but for God, that is not an impossibility.
Ask yourself -- "What effect would His presence have had in that scene in my life? How would I have felt differently? How would the other persons there respond if I were to introduce them to my friend Jesus?"
Such a seemingly innocuous and childlike "what if" flight into fantasy may occur many times in a therapy process known as "the healing of memories", or more broadly, "inner healing". The discovery of the healing potential through use of the imagination has given us extraordinary insight into the nature of the human personality. This book is written to put this insight into its proper Biblical context.
"Inner healing", in my usage, is the process of getting one's spiritual life together with one's emotional life. It a general term referring to a specifically Christian psychology, to be distinguished from "the healing of memories", which is a specific kind of event within inner healing -- walking back with Jesus into a memory for the healing of that memory.
Inner healing also needs to be distinguished from spiritual formation or spiritual direction, which is the normal process of growing up into spiritual maturity.
Others use the terms more narrowly. William Barry and William Connolly write in their book, The Practice of Spiritual Direction:
As we have come to understand it, spiritual direction differs from moral guidance, psychological counseling, and the practice of confessional, preaching, or healing ministries (although having affinities with them) in that it directly assists individuals in developing and cultivating their personal relationship with God. P. ix.
We define Christian spiritual direction, then, as the help given by one Christian to another which enables that person to pay attention to God's personal communication to him or her, to respond to this personally, communicating God, to grow in intimacy with this God, and to live out the consequences of the relationship. The focus of this type of spiritual direction is on experience, not ideas, and specifically on religious experience, i.e, any experience of the mysterious Other whom we call God. ...the focus of interest is the prayer experience of the directee. P. 10-11.
Inner healing as presented in this present book might incorporate elements of any or all of the above mentioned modes of spiritual or psychological help. The typically imagined wall between secular "psyche" and spiritual "soul" vanishes. The wall exists only between the worldviews which different persons might hold. But as human beings, in the Biblical world, there is no distinction between soul and psyche. Psychologists are dealing with souls, although they may be dealing with those souls from a disadvantaged (secular) worldview.
One might need inner healing when the spiritual maturation process gets derailed because of inner emotional turmoil such that the normal processes of spiritual growth -- prayer, worship, Bible study, etc. -- are not working.
We each have a "bottle of repression" into which we stuff our unwanted feelings and emotions, with a cork sealed firmly on top. A part of ourselves becomes imprisoned in that bottle, unable to function with the rest of ourselves, yearning to get out, pressing up on the cork. We are unable to let ourselves out, and other persons seem to help only very partially. Who will let Gene out? Will Jeannie ever run free again?
The Biblical claims for healing center finally on the person of Jesus. He told His disciples that if He went back to the Father, He would send the Comforter, the Holy Spirit of God, to dwell within us (John 14-16). The presence of the Spirit was associated with healing and abundant life.
God was doing a specific thing to answer specific problems in our human nature. There was and is a discernible human nature to which God was addressing Himself, that very human nature designed by God. If we have a human nature, and if God is working to save that nature in us, then that human nature ought to be something we could learn about so that we might better cooperate with the process of salvation and healing. That is (partly) what both revelation and psychology are about. We learn not only of God, but of ourselves - made in His image -- male and female.
Although Christian spiritual healing will focus on Jesus, most of what is said in this book will, I believe, be compatible with a Jewish understanding of spiritual healing. At a time in history when both Jews and Christians are targeted culturally, politically, and militarily for extinction, it is well for Westerners to understand that Western culture is not just Christian, it is Judeo-Christian. Basic Christian theology, and certainly the theology in this book, comes out of the Torah. And since we are made in the Imago Dei, our basic anthropology and psychology must also come out of the Torah. How far we can go in working together in such matters without compromising our distinctive beliefs and testimonies remains to be seen, but we must make the effort.
Is a Biblical psychology possible? Would it be any more than a smattering of prayer pasted over secular psychology? Or would it mean an intrusion of anti-rational religion, Scripture quotes, and moralisms into the realm of scientific study? Can Jesus really set Gene free? Even in the dark realms of those hidden memories?
A Biblical psychology rests on the Biblical worldview and the contention that we humans are modeled on the Image of God. In the Biblical view of reality, persons, not things, not atoms or ideas or essences, are the basic building blocks of the cosmos. -- what might be called a "personalist" view of the cosmos, a "personalist" philosophy. The basic reality is persons and their relationships. All else, including all of nature, is subsidiary to that. We do not emerge or evolve out of a prior and more basic substrate, neither a physical stuff (as in secular humanism) nor a spiritual stuff (as in Eastern religions). We are not cosmic accidents, a bit of accidental debris blown about on a cosmic sea of accidental debris, we are deliberately planned by a personal Creator and Sovereign over all things.19
When we view life that way, all the rules change, including the rules for emotional healing. They also make more sense, and are more effective. Life, growth, healing are then all about our relation with God.
In the beginning of the Christian Church, it was not imagined by anybody that the healing of souls would be separate from one's spiritual life. It was assumed that God was indeed the healer, and that as one came into a relation with Him, healing would take place. God was the source of healing.
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Getting well emotionally is neither simple nor easy. The sorts of emotional pits into which we fall are seldom a matter of simply climbing out into the light of day. The deviousness of the world, the flesh, and the devil in all of their sin and darkness and ignorance, and the intricacy of the web of self-delusion and defensiveness we manage to weave around ourselves are hopelessly paralyzing when experienced from inside the darkness. There is no way out -- unless Someone comes in from the outside to lead us out.
Our biggest problem is the paranoia that inspires our pathological distrust of anyone helping us. So we end up locking ourselves into our self-constructed dungeon, even from God. Sometimes especially from God.
"Labyrinth" is a recurring theme in New Age circles partly because people are unaware of its meaning. But the theme has ancient roots in many ancient cultures. The labyrinth, or maze, is a closed circle from which escape is impossible or all but impossible. One gets lost once he enters those endless and confusing pathways. Sometimes there is a dangerous figure lurking, as the legendary Minotaur in the labyrinth on the island of Crete.
Theseus, a citizen of Athens, volunteered to be part of the yearly sacrifice given to Crete, under which Athens was then in bondage. The sacrifice was offered by the Cretans to placate the Minotaur. Theseus hoped to slay the Minotaur and free Athens from the curse. Ariadne, the king's daughter, fell in love with Theseus and gave him a ball of twine, which Theseus unraveled as he went into the labyrinth. He killed the Minotaur and found his way back out by following the twine.
The labyrinth is an apt symbol of the closed circle of Uroboros into which the Fall plunges us. There is no way out other than by the intervention of God from outside the closed circle. Much spirituality associated with the labyrinth is an attempt to use the resources of the closed world system for our healing. But we seal ourselves so completely in the smoke and mirrors largely of our own making that we cannot find our way back to reality. The defensive walls which we hope to be our fortress sooner or later becomes our tomb, the Pit, the Abyss, Hell, Erewhon.
But there are things we can do and five decisions to make, no matter what our circumstances, that will always further the process of our moving into the light of truth and freedom. These decisions are inalienable because they belong to us just because we are alive, and, importantly, because at their deepest level, these decisions appeal to a realm beyond the control of the world, the flesh or the devil -- the metaphysical, spiritual realm.
Having a proper understanding of how human nature works is essential to making progress along the path of spiritual growth. Once therefore we have digested certain key truths and we begin to pursue those decisions, things will almost inevitably begin to work better. Whereas without these truths and these decisions, we will for sure remain stuck in our darkness. Proper spiritual direction from a spiritual advisor should always include consideration of where we stand in these essential decisions. Without an assessment at this level it will be difficult to know whether or how to proceed with therapy.
It is not true that "if you believe it hard enough, it will happen." We do not in our own strength believe or will or choose ourselves into health. Nevertheless we must believe and choose and will the truth, and the truth we believe must be ultimately positive, or we will not proceed very securely or very far on the road to health. If the Gospel of Jesus Christ, or something like it, is not the truth, then our hope of ultimate healing is in vain. Our very human nature requires it. We must believe in order to get well, and we must make decisions. But we do our believing and deciding in the context of a real and objective world and with a real and determinate human nature. And therefore those beliefs and those decisions must be both realistic and in the context of a hopeful universe, or they are in vain.
By making the Five Decisions to be well, to be whole, to be what we are created to be, we begin consciously to participate in our own creation -- or re-creation. We become co-creators with God of our own personality by choosing to be made in His image. The ultimate choice -- we build heaven with God, or hell all by ourselves.
Being made in the image of God is not merely an obscure religious sentiment. It is a basic principle for child raising and for maturing into freestanding adulthood. If I want to know who I really am, I must get to know God, and getting to know God is making the Biblical choices for this five-part decision.
One of those objective facts of life which we have utmost difficulty in facing is our dependent nature. During our very dependent times, primarily infancy, we are the most vulnerable. When we are in a dependent situation we can most easily suffer the damage which may lead later to emotional stress, depression, suicide, drug dependency, etc. But dependency is inherently a relationship.
It is in dependency relationships that we are either nurtured and matured or that we experience damage. And therefore it is in healthy dependency relationships that we find the cure to the damage we suffered in unhealthy relationships. Knowing the truth about such relationships and making decisions about them therefore leads to the deepest kind of emotional healing. That is the subject of this chapter.
This is not to say that merely making decisions will catapult us into health. But, if we do not make those decisions, the child, the Gene or the Jeannie down in the bottle, will never be set free and we will never come to the fullness of who we are as human beings. Those issues involve getting our emotional life together with our spiritual life, allowing our relation with God to become that key relationship in terms of which all lesser relationships can be brought into order. We must allow God to draw us into that dependency relationship with Himself so that He can inform and redeem all of those earlier damaging relationships, for it is clear that there is no relationship within the world which can fully redeem the past for us. Only God can do that, who dwells outside of the cosmos and who called us and the cosmos into being.
Christians have talked about this key decision as the decision to follow Christ, to come to the Father through Jesus, to be born again, or to live in the power of the Holy Spirit. In this chapter I want to unpack some of the psychological implications of that decision, and to show how our decision to follow Christ is indeed the key to our wholeness as human beings.
Humanism has often been pictured as the enemy of Christianity. And that is true, if by humanism we mean man putting himself at the center of the universe - "Man is the measure of all things".
But if by humanism we mean becoming most fully and richly human, then following Christ is the way to humanism, becoming who we truly are at the deepest level of our being. This is the Christian humanism toward which Erasmus and a few others pointed at the time of the Reformation. They were, unfortunately, outvoted by the major leaders of the Reformation. But the truth remains, if you want to be truly human, you must be like Jesus, the only true measure of humanity and of humanism. The Imago Dei is the measure of all things, the yardstick for our own being and doing.
With that in mind, I want to put the decision to be well in the context of basic human needs, needs that are common to all mankind. The decision to be well is, as I conceive it, Five Decisions, five matters with which every human being, like it or not, has to grapple. They are built into the human situation.
We are by nature goal-oriented. We choose an ultimate purpose for our lives, and work toward that purpose as nearly as we can. But we are made for a purpose also. We were designed for a specific goal by God long before we had any purposes of our own. Should we choose less than that goal, we will be trying to function as something less than that for which we are made, and often in contradiction to it, thus aiding and abetting sickness. Choosing the proper goal for our lives is an inherent part of choosing to be well.
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There has been a tussle in the Christian community between those who see repentance for sin as the answer for our problems and those who see the healing of our brokenness as the answer.
That is a false division which impairs the healing and maturing process. Both healing and repentance are needed, which means we must learn how to tell which one. In a fallen world, there will be both sin and brokenness, so, properly understood, the therapeutic mode is spouse to the spiritual growth mode.
Generally, healing for wholeness represents the mothering side, renewed wholeness, and repentance represents the fathering side, renewed holiness. But in the plan of God, the two require each other. Godly mothering is wedded to Godly fathering. That part of me which is not whole cannot be holy. Wholeness is the substance of holiness, for, after all, it is the whole of me that is to become holy. I am to be wholly dedicated to God.
Wholeness and holiness therefore represent our two basic dependencies for being made in the Imago Dei, dependency for our being and for our direction, our ontological and our moral dependencies.
The early Christian community had -- to a depth that few cultures have experienced since -- a faith relation with God out of which their lives flowed. Their lives flowed not only from God, but to one another, and beyond the borders of their communities and their nations to turn the course of world history. God was not just an idea or an ideal, but a living reality, the Creator of all the world Whose children they knew themselves to be. One can experience no deeper or more powerful affirmation of selfhood.
Therapists talk of the "therapeutic alliance" between therapist and client, an emotional and intellectual bonding within which the resources of the therapist can become part of the life of the client. The therapist becomes a "God" figure for the client much as parents had earlier been. The client is being "re-parented" as the damaged internal images of mothering and fathering are brought into a more healthy and life giving state. But the therapist may be attempting something which only God can do.
As a matter of common sense logic, the world cannot parent me to become an adult in the world because the world cannot set me free from itself. The world can, at best, make me an adult-child-of-the-world, which is always a compromised adult. That is so because I will always be dependent on, and therefore not an adult with respect to, that part of the world which is parenting me. That is why, in order to see the Kingdom of God (real adulthood), we must be born again. To be an adult in the world, I must be a child in God.
To be "born again" (as Jesus tells Nicodemus in John 3:1 ff.) is to become a child (a dependent) of God, no longer of the world. Nicodemus could no longer rely on his Jewish identity, his being a son of Abraham, to complete his spiritual journey. He would have to become a son of God. With all of us, God will have to do the final reparenting.
That is a logical fact for which, to understand, one needs no special revelation from God. If one understands the logic of dependency, one will understand much of the logic of Biblical salvation. The therapeutic alliance must finally be established with God, not with any human being.
Unless the world can show that we humans are truly autonomous beings, needing only to discover that marvelous fact, the world will have to face up to its inherent dead-end. It cannot raise up real adults, persons who can stand emotionally and spiritually independent of the circumstances of life.
The whole course of salvation history can be seen as God leaning down from heaven to draw us back into that alliance and bonding of faith relationship where alone we can safely rest our dependency independently from the world.
Christians have been teaching for 20 centuries the doctrine of salvation by faith. The first, second, and third century AD experience of that truth strikes one as far more powerful than that of any later century, with perhaps a few localized exceptions of spiritual renewal. But the meaning of 'faith' has altered drastically over those intervening centuries -- reflecting that downhill slide.
In our time, faith has come to carry a flavor at which the first three centuries of Christians would have blinked, of being contrary to "real" (i.e., scientific) knowledge, and therefore to suggest being out of touch with reality. That would have been far from the thinking of early Christians, who understood themselves to be supremely in touch with reality.
Faith did not have that negative flavor in the first three centuries because the force to which faith in the modern era has become opposed in most people's minds had not yet arisen, namely that of secular scientific humanism. Secular humanism was known to the early Greek philosophers, but it did not yet have the power and authority over men's minds which it received with the addition of "science, i.e., the scientific method.
The ground work for the split between faith and "real" knowledge on the other hand was already being laid in the middle ages as philosophers asked, "What is the nature of reality?" The Biblical revelation was strongly influenced, in many cases diluted and contaminated, by the power of Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy had much to offer, but it did not have access to a cosmic framework equal to that of the Hebrews.
The power of Hellenic philosophy lay in the fact that brilliant minds had expounded on the intellectual tools for discovering truth and refined them for centuries, whereas Biblical thinkers did not tend to develop their thinking in terms of philosophical tools by which to explain the nature of the cosmos. Intellectual tools can be helpful to any culture. On the other hand, the Hebrews, when they bothered to listen, had access to the One who had created the cosmos.
Christians have made a poor showing in philosophical discussion since the Renaissance and Enlightenment. And then, during the 20th century in particular, the Christian community was not where you went for rigorous and clear thinking about the big issues of life. And so Christianity has looked somewhat less than realistic in the eyes of many people.
If it is true that we are saved by our faith, and had we been able to meet the challenge of secularism successfully, we would have seen that there is a vital and necessary connection between our human nature as we all experience it and the quality of faith that we have. But faith was relegated to "religion" and human nature was relegated to secular psychology.
The word 'salvation' in the Biblical context carries with it the notion of the fullness of health, wholeness, joy, and integrity, touching our physical, emotional, and spiritual lives, integrating them into a unity. Shalom. Wholeness.
The Bible does not teach that there is a spiritual realm to which we are going, leaving behind this naughty physical realm. Rather, from Genesis to Revelation, the Bible teaches that the physical realm is to be a sacrament, an outward and visible sign, of the spiritual, and that God is redeeming the physical so that it will indeed be that -- from which it had fallen. The sacramental split between the physical and spiritual does not exist in the Bible. That split was part of our inheritance from Greek and other pagan philosophy and religion, very evident in the Church by the late middle ages.
In order to make sense of salvation by faith, we must have a concept of faith obviously related to the fullness of salvation, a concept that does not point beyond the physical to a mystical transaction in heaven, but which draws our very physical experience of humanness sacramentally together with heaven.
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This chapter on the nature of the unconscious will deal with concepts that may be hard to grasp, but which will be very helpful in dealing with some of the issues related to a Biblical view of human nature, and with some of the objections to such a view. I encourage the reader to soldier on, read it twice, or more if necessary, as it will provide additional and important foundation for understanding the bottomless chasm between the Biblical view and the secular/pagan view of psychology.
Persons familiar with either Freudian, Jungian, or Adlerian psychology may object that I am dealing too lightly with those pioneers. I have expressed my thoughts on each of those psychologies in other places, and wish to keep the argument of this book clear of diversions.20
Controversy has been generated over the healing of memories, often revolving around a misunderstanding of the unconscious. The issues tend to center around visualizing, which is labeled "occult", "pagan", or a sell out to secularism.21 Some will say that since we are new creatures in Christ, there is no need for psychological intervention. In Jesus we are already made whole and new.
What might seem like good Biblical principles often are used in a manner out of touch with reality. We are just as responsible for reading the Book of Creation as the Book of Scripture. Reason and faith are allies, not enemies.
If I have a broken arm, and those who pray for me tell me to "claim my healing", implying or saying that God has already healed me, and it is only my lack of faith that keeps me from experiencing that healing, and if yet my arm remains broken despite the best efforts at cranking up my faith that I can put forth, what am I to do?
I may be counseled, "Believe and act as though you are already healed because you are. Believe it on the Word of God." Again, the implication is that I do not experience the healing because of my lack of faith. In my respect for these persons as my counselors and friends, I am likely to pay more attention to their advice than to the obvious truth of the matter, and consequently am liable to feel guilty for not living up to their expectations. We may be confusing what God is expecting of us with what well meaning (or over-controlling) Christians are expecting of us.
It is perfectly possible, of course, that indeed my faith is lacking, and that that is a part of the block to the healing. But if my arm is still broken, it is still broken. It does not glorify God to claim that it is in some mysterious, invisible sense "healed". Christians are called to truth, not to wishful thinking. I will know perfectly well when my arm is healed -- when it behaves like a healed arm.
A lack of faith in God will disorient me concerning the most basic matters of trust (ontological security) and obedience (meaning of existence). And that can certainly hinder healing -- even on a physical, medical level. Doctors know that patients with a positive spirit have a higher chance of healing.
If my faith is indeed lacking, I do better to set about on an intelligent journey of growth in my faith rather than spending time feeling guilty and miserable for not meeting someone's mistaken expectations.
The same kind of situations occur with emotional sickness and healing. We want to believe that God desires to heal us and that as we come to Him in sincerity, we will be healed within as well as bodily. But the obvious fact staring us all in the face is that countless Christians, born again, baptized in the Spirit, ministering powerfully at times, are still plagued with emotional and spiritual difficulties (as Paul describes in Romans 7). It does not help these people to say that they do not have enough faith unless there is reason for believing so independently of their not being healed.
If we take this approach to healing, we have two choices, either to say that they have not really been born again, or to deny that the alleged disease really does exist.
Either option is out of touch with my experience of reality, and I suspect with that of most Christians. We have good reason to believe that many of those in question have indeed been born anew in Christ and also that their disease or discomfort does indeed continue to exist (as Paul's thorn in the flesh). That is not to say that the question of genuine faith should not be raised, but it is to say that it is only one of the possibilities, and that it should never be raised in an arbitrary manner.
One of the fruits of the last two hundred years of secular psychology has been to uncover and elaborate on the notion of the unconscious aspects of ourselves. Sigmund Freud did not invent the idea, but he did develop the notion more fully and dramatically than anyone prior to himself.
Freud's view was materialist in outlook. He thought of the ego as subject to the "drives" of the unconscious, the id, and the superego. He was quickly followed by his rebel students, Carl Jung with his notion of the objective or archetypal or collective unconscious, and then Alfred Adler who thought of the unconscious as the "not understood" part of ourselves. These three in the early part of the 20th century contributed their own unique formulations of the unconscious, quite in disagreement with each other in essential issues. Others have contributed likewise since the original three.
This is not the place to delve into their respective views, excepting to say that none of the three was a Christian, and none of the three rested his psychology on the Biblical view of the world.22 If forced to make a choice, I would nominate Adler's view as the most compatible with Biblical Christianity, the many supporters of Jung not withstanding.23 But from a Biblical point of view, although elements can be taken from each of their psychologies and used by Christians with profit, the Christian must carefully inspect to ensure that the items he is importing from secular sources are indeed compatible with the Biblical framework.
The notion of the unconscious was developed among secular therapists for much the same reasons that Christians find themselves considering it, namely to account for behavior and feelings and reactions that we do not seem to be able to account for on the strictly conscious level. The fact that secular people developed the notion first with secular values and a secular view of the cosmos gave the notion of the unconscious a reputation as being a means of explaining God and religion away.
Unfortunately Christians did not get there first because it all depends on which worldview you begin with. One's psychology is ultimately determined by his philosophy or religion, not vice versa. If you begin with a secular philosophy, you will have a secular psychology. And if you begin with a Biblical cosmology, you will have a Biblical view of human nature, including a Biblical understanding of the unconscious. It is that which we will discuss in this chapter.
There are miracles. People are sometimes healed instantaneously. And we can be indeed new creatures in Christ.
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The Prologue to the Gospel of John is the New Testament creation story -- a cosmic and archetypal sweep of creation.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light.
The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. (John bore witness to him, and cried, 'This was he of whom I said, "He who comes after me ranks before me, for he was before me."') And from his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.
John 1:1-18.
We know that something extraordinary is happening because, as is generally true of the Bible, the cosmic and archetypal lens very comfortably zooms down to the particular and concrete, in this case, John the Baptist and Moses.
Only in the Biblical world does it make sense for the archetypal and metaphysical reality to mix with the mundane, created reality. In the secular world, there is no archetypal or metaphysical, and in the pagan world, the archetypal is wholly other than, and therefore incompatible and incommensurate with, the world of time and space.
Cosmic and archetypal mix with the particular and concrete through myth (secular/pagan) or through history (Biblical). The extent to which Christian theology had been Hellenized is shown by how often Christians felt it necessary to "go beyond" personal images of God, that personal images were "anthropomorphizing" God, intellectually condescending to give the infinite a merely finite form. So personal pictures of God were discounted as "mere analogies", not anything like literal pictures.
Not every scene in Scripture is meant literally. The Bible is well acquainted with metaphor, analogy, and poetry. But, from the Biblical point of view, the concept of personhood is a close and understandable rendering of both divine and human being. Of all the concepts we have, personhood is perhaps the most literally applicable between God and man.24
That is the logical meaning of being made in the Imago Dei. Persons, beginning with God, are the basic entities of the cosmos.
The primitive, pre-historical, pre-scientific mind did not clearly distinguish between myth and history as we try to do. Zeus was thought to be an historical figure dwelling on Mt. Olympus. But with the advent of more sophisticated modes of distinguishing truth from falsehood, it became more difficult to keep the cosmic and archetypal Zeus consistently related to daily experience of the concrete and particular Mount Olympus. No one could find Zeus up on the mountain in question.
Most of modern secularism has given up the attempt, and relegated our contact with the archetypal to the realm of myth (meaning just a fable), or now out-of-favor metaphysics, all of which is a part of the modern bent toward "relative" rather than objective truth. For most philosophers, metaphysics is dead. The history of certain brands of nominalism and the death of God" from Hume to Kant to the 1960's is the story of the loss of the sense of the archetypal, cosmic, and metaphysical significance to our lives. Few historians of the last two centuries have believed that history was going toward an objective moral end. It was evolving randomly according to the current (chaotic? irrational?) forces at work.